{"id":12165,"date":"2026-04-22T11:12:20","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T11:12:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/12165\/"},"modified":"2026-04-22T11:12:20","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T11:12:20","slug":"merck-to-partner-with-google-cloud-on-ai-initiatives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/12165\/","title":{"rendered":"Merck to partner with Google Cloud on AI initiatives"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Michael Erman<\/p>\n

NEW YORK, April 22 (Reuters) – Drugmaker Merck & Co said on Wednesday it will partner with Google Cloud to build up its artificial intelligence capabilities, investing \u200cas much as $1 billion with Google over a number of years to fund AI \u200cinfrastructure, engineers and licensing of the tech company’s Gemini Enterprise platform.<\/p>\n

The partnership, announced at Google’s Cloud Next conference in \u200bLas Vegas, builds on work already underway between the companies and includes Google Cloud engineers working alongside Merck teams, executives from both companies said.<\/p>\n

“I easily see us investing a billion over the next several years in this, in those capabilities,” Dave Williams, Merck’s chief information and digital officer, said in \u200can interview. “We’re not just buying \u2060tokens. It is really the tool set” Google Cloud offers, he said, including Gemini Enterprise and the company’s engineers.<\/p>\n

Williams said the companies haven’t defined a \u2060specific time frame for the collaboration, but he expects it to be at least a decade-long partnership.<\/p>\n

The companies said the partnership will work to deploy AI across Merck’s drug research, regulatory work, manufacturing and \u200bcommercial operations.<\/p>\n

Both \u200bcompanies framed the collaboration as a way to \u200baccelerate drug development.<\/p>\n

“We’ve always said we wanted \u200cAI to play a positive role in society. One of the ways is to help people find cures to illnesses,” Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google Cloud, said in the same interview. “They have the domain knowledge. We’re bringing the AI tools<\/a> and platform and cyber capability to help them build using these tools.”<\/p>\n

Merck plans to use AI across the drug development process, Williams \u200csaid, including running computerized simulations of laboratory experiments and \u200bspeeding the regulatory process. Merck has used AI to help \u200bprepare sections of clinical study reports \u200bfor roughly two years with some success, he said, and now plans \u200cto expand that approach.<\/p>\n

“We feel there’s a tremendous \u200bopportunity there, and it’s \u200ba huge information challenge,” he said.<\/p>\n

Williams added that Merck already has used Google’s technology to cut down by half the time and cost of compiling dossiers required in many \u200bcountries to secure reimbursement for \u200cnew medicines.<\/p>\n

“This isn’t a pilot,” Williams said. “We’re submitting dossiers in markets using this new \u200bcapability, and we’re now scaling it globally.”<\/p>\n

Google Cloud is a unit of Alphabet \u200bInc.<\/p>\n

(Reporting by Michael Erman; Editing by Paul Simao)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Michael Erman NEW YORK, April 22 (Reuters) – Drugmaker Merck & Co said on Wednesday it will…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12166,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[24,407,9748,132,1429,2194,9749],"class_list":{"0":"post-12165","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-google","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-infrastructure","10":"tag-dave-williams","11":"tag-google","12":"tag-google-ai","13":"tag-google-cloud","14":"tag-merck"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12165\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}